Girl Power

There is a curious asymmetry in the way we think about adulthood.

An adult woman can still be a girl sometimes.

An adult man can very rarely still be a boy.

This sounds trivial, but the more one notices it, the stranger it becomes.

Consider the names some highly accomplished women have chosen for themselves or their businesses:

The Cloud Girl.

The Data Girl.

The Finance Girl.

The Marketing Girl.

GirlCEO.

Girlboss.

These are not names belonging to adolescents. They are attached to women with serious professional credentials, businesses, careers and responsibilities. Girl is being used deliberately as part of an adult identity.

Now consider the corresponding male versions:

The Cloud Boy.

The Data Boy.

The Finance Boy.

BoyCEO.

They sound almost comical.

The difference is not merely linguistic. It seems to reveal something about the social meaning of adulthood for men and women.

What does “girl” mean?

There is, of course, a traditional and rather unpleasant meaning of calling an adult woman a “girl”: infantilization.

A woman who is denied authority by being called a girl is not being empowered. Historically, girl could be used precisely to imply that a woman was inexperienced, subordinate or lacking adult status.

But that isn’t the interesting phenomenon here.

What is interesting is the voluntary use of “girl” by adult women themselves.

In this context, the word seems to carry a very different set of associations:

playfulness, friendship, spontaneity, enthusiasm, solidarity, energy, fun.

“The girls are going out tonight.”

“Girls’ night.”

“Girl power.”

These expressions don’t usually evoke children.

They evoke adult women who have temporarily ??? or perhaps permanently ??? retained something associated with girlhood.

And what they have retained isn’t necessarily immaturity.

It may be something much more valuable.

The strange things we lose when we grow up

Children possess some qualities that adults spend an extraordinary amount of time trying to recover.

They are curious.

They are easily fascinated.

They become excited without embarrassment.

They play for no productive reason.

They can laugh until they can barely breathe.

They dance because there is music.

They shout when they are happy.

They become completely absorbed in whatever has captured their attention.

They have not yet learned to constantly monitor themselves through the imagined eyes of others.

Of course, childhood also contains selfishness, impulsivity, ignorance and an inability to appreciate consequences. Growing up is partly the process of overcoming these limitations.

But it is not obvious that maturity requires us to abandon wonder, playfulness, enthusiasm and spontaneous joy along with them.

In fact, many of the most attractive qualities of a psychologically healthy adult are remarkably childlike.

The scientist’s curiosity.

The artist’s playfulness.

The entrepreneur’s enthusiasm.

The comedian’s willingness to be ridiculous.

The ability to become fascinated by something that has no immediate practical value.

These are not signs of immaturity.

They may be signs that something important has survived maturity.

Why does this seem more permissible for women?

This is where the observation becomes more interesting.

A group of adult women can sometimes behave with astonishing exuberance.

They scream with excitement.

They dance badly.

They hug.

They laugh hysterically.

They take ridiculous photographs.

They become intensely excited about something that, from the outside, appears completely trivial.

And the behaviour is generally interpreted rather generously:

They’re having fun.

They’re enjoying themselves.

How wonderful.

The equivalent behaviour among adult men certainly exists. Football stadiums provide perhaps the largest laboratory for it.

But outside particular contexts, male exuberance can more easily be interpreted as childishness.

The adult man is expected to have acquired a certain degree of composure.

He should be self-controlled.

He should be independent.

He should be competent.

He should not appear needy.

He should not be too easily excited.

He should not seem ridiculous.

In other words, there appears to be a stronger cultural imperative for a man to demonstrate that he has left boyhood behind.

And perhaps this explains the strange linguistic asymmetry.

A “boy” is someone who has not yet become a man.

But a “girl” can mean something else entirely.

The music exception

But then there is an obvious and rather wonderful counterexample.

The music world is full of adult men calling themselves boys.

The Beach Boys.

The Pet Shop Boys.

The Beastie Boys.

The Backstreet Boys.

The Oak Ridge Boys.

Boyz II Men.

The Fat Boys.

And many others.

Suddenly, “boy” doesn’t seem threatening to masculine identity at all.

Quite the opposite.

The Beach Boys don’t sound like a group of men who have failed to grow up. The name evokes youth, freedom, surfing, summer, energy and a certain carefree masculinity.

The Pet Shop Boys are an even more interesting example. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe were fully grown adults when they adopted the name, and it certainly didn’t prevent them from being taken seriously as musicians.

And Boyz II Men almost seems to make the contradiction explicit. The name contains both identities:

boys ??? men

Yet nobody finds this psychologically incoherent.

So perhaps the original observation needs an important qualification.

Maybe adult men can be boys ??? but they need permission.

Music provides that permission.

Sport provides it.

Gaming does.

Certain forms of male friendship and male bonding do.

There are social contexts in which an adult man can become exuberant, silly, competitive, loud, playful and even explicitly identify with boyhood without losing masculine status.

Outside those contexts, the same behaviour can be more problematic.

This may be an important distinction.

Perhaps the difference isn’t:

Women are allowed to remain girls; men aren’t allowed to remain boys.

It may instead be:

Both men and women retain elements of childhood, but society gives them different ways of legitimizing those elements.

For women, girlhood itself seems to have become a relatively legitimate component of adult femininity.

For men, boyhood may need to be transformed into something more specifically masculine: the boys, the lads, the guys, the bros, the team, the band.

And music may be one of the places where that transformation is most explicit.

The social meaning of “girlhood”

Perhaps contemporary femininity has managed to incorporate some aspects of girlhood without requiring women to surrender adult status.

This is particularly visible in female friendship.

“The girls” can be women in their twenties, forties, sixties or beyond.

The phrase doesn’t necessarily indicate immaturity. It indicates a particular social relationship: intimacy, familiarity, playfulness and belonging.

There is something similar in the enormous cultural success of expressions such as Girlboss.

The interesting thing about “Girlboss” is not whether the concept itself is admirable. It is that the word combines two categories that, on the surface, should be incompatible:

girl + boss.

A boss is someone with authority.

A girl is traditionally someone who hasn’t yet acquired adult authority.

And yet the combination became culturally powerful precisely because the contradiction was somehow productive.

It suggested that a woman could be ambitious and powerful without having to adopt every traditionally masculine signal of seriousness and authority.

The word girl became almost a declaration:

I can be successful without becoming entirely conventional.

There is a deeper question here

Perhaps the difference is not that women are more childish.

Perhaps it is that childlike qualities carry different social costs for men and women.

A woman who is enthusiastic may be perceived as energetic.

A man who is enthusiastic may be perceived as immature.

A woman who is emotionally expressive may be perceived as warm.

A man who is emotionally expressive may be perceived as lacking control.

A woman being silly may be perceived as playful.

A man being silly may undermine his perceived authority.

These are obviously generalizations. Individuals vary enormously, cultures differ, and the boundaries are constantly changing.

But if even part of this asymmetry is real, it has an intriguing consequence.

Men may receive stronger incentives to suppress precisely those qualities that make life more enjoyable.

Not responsibility.

Not competence.

Not self-control.

Those are worth keeping.

But perhaps also some of the qualities that existed before we became so concerned with appearing competent in the first place.

Curiosity.

Excitement.

Wonder.

Play.

Spontaneity.

The ability to be ridiculous.

Perhaps “growing up” is the wrong metaphor

We tend to imagine psychological development as a one-way progression:

child ??? adolescent ??? adult.

Something is acquired at every stage and something else is discarded.

But perhaps that is too simple.

A mature human being may be someone who has added adult capacities without completely losing the earlier ones.

The ideal might not be to replace the child with the adult.

It might be to let the adult contain the child.

Perhaps that is one reason the expression “girl power” is so interesting.

It doesn’t simply mean female power.

The word girl seems to add something: energy, playfulness, solidarity, irreverence, perhaps even a refusal to accept that adulthood has to mean becoming entirely serious.

And the music exception makes the picture more interesting still.

Perhaps men have their own cultural mechanisms for preserving boyhood ??? the band, the team, the game, the boys’ night out.

The difference may simply be that these mechanisms are more context-dependent.

Which raises a question that seems more interesting than whether one gender is “more mature” than the other:

What exactly do we lose when we grow up ??? and why are some people allowed to keep it?

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